How was your experience with Jira?
The performance is absolute dog shit. Every interaction with it painfully slow. For example, the page to view a single issue is almost 20MB fetched over 100 HTTP requests and takes 10 seconds to load. This is without cache. With assets cached, it is still 4 seconds to render. This is the fastest interaction by the way. Everything else is worse.
Maybe some of this is my organization's fault. I really don't know. What I do know is that it is so slow that I dread every interaction with it.
As far as how useful Jira is, a huge percentage of that is going to be your team's processes external to Jira. I have found it to be a very good mirror. If your team's processes are a mess, your Jira instance will quickly become one as well. But if your team is organized and is bringing an existing, functional system to Jira, I have found that it's a good enough value add to be worth it.
It's definitely an enabler, though, rather than a tool that will funnel you into good practices. (The same can be said for Confluence but it's even more true there IMO.)
One light at the end of the tunnel is the Mac app (for some reason there is no Windows or Linux version). It's much more lightweight and feels way faster than the web version. However, it is buggy in my experience, and a fair few things I do a lot can't be done in it and require the web interface, but for quickly checking stuff it mostly works.
linear.app :-)
It is however not that expensive which matters especially when most of the company needs accounts and not just engineers. $7/user/month for basic or $14 for everything you reasonably care about. Gitlab is $19 or $99/user/month.
I'd use GitHub if my team were willing to do non-technical project management with it as well. I wish GitHub would add features for non-technical users on projects. It would be a huge win.
Literally just spend some time on some docs features and provide a view of projects that isn't centered on code for those users that aren't involved in the code.
For a reasonably technical user, you can make it work, except that the views just aren't built for them, so it's a lot of visual clutter that isn't necessary and holds the product back.
Been looking at Clickup since, like Jira+Confluence, you can integrate wiki/web documents with your project management tooling. I've found that this is a pretty critical feature. I've tried repeatedly to get folks to rally around Google Drive or a folder of Office documents, and it's just not the same as working in a single, integrated web experience.
Nevertheless... it is an absolute and horrible hog. It is so slow and clumsy that it is frustrating. Also, when they changed the interface they kind of hid a lot of stuff that used to be there. Also the free "Gantt" feature they have sucks, and the paid one is OK but does not justify upgrading 50+ users to the plan that makes it available.